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Tuesday, 6 January 2009

Mao's Great Famine 1959-61

2009 sees the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Great Chinese Famine. Estimates of the number who died range as high as 40 million. There were floods, there was drought, but above all there was the chaos produced by Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward.” Peasants were dragooned into huge inefficient centralised farms, or were diverted from the land to make steel by melting down pots and pans in backyard furnaces, or to build giant, shoddy dams – many of which soon collapsed.Other madcap schemes included killing all the birds, and planting seeds more closely together so they choked each other. The trouble was that even as people starved, the government propaganda machine was claiming that harvests were at record levels and that there were dazzling agri-technological achievements like crossing cows with pigs.

2 comments:

I don't believe they did succeed in this ambitious project. Mao's "good news reporting stations" also proclaimed achievements such as crossing cotton with tomatoes to produce red cotton, and said that since collectivisation, the peasants were producing pumpkins weighing 10 stones. The smaller the real harvests got, the bigger were the phantom ones claimed by the authorities.

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Author of 'Storm: Nature and Culture', 'Flood: Nature and Culture','Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters','London's Disasters','The Disastrous History of London' ('Capital Disasters' in hardback), 'A Disastrous History of Britain', 'A Disastrous History of the World', 'Disaster! A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues and Other Catastrophes', and 'Shutdown. Anatomy of a Shipyard Closure.' Producer/director of more
than 40 tv documentaries. Former radio producer. Freelance writer for publications such as the Guardian, Independent, Daily Express, Observer, New Statatesman. Freelance communications consultant and adviser. http://www.disasterhistorian.com/